Has tech employment turned a corner?

CNET News.com is carrying a story focused on employment trends in the tech industry. As I've posted in the past, for certain sectors within IT there has been mimi hiring booms going on and for others they are still in slumps. The good news is that overall, it seems that the IT industry has been turning the corner. The first paragraph says it all: "the country's high-tech industry shed 25,300 jobs in 2004, to 5.6 million. By comparison, 333,000 tech industry jobs were lost in 2003 and 612,000 in 2002, according to the trade group."

For anyone involved with Linux the next several years should see growing demand for their skill sets as teh various flavors of Linux start replacing Unix in the server market. There have also been a couple reports coming out of Camp Redmond of their concern over Linux making a run at dominating the server market. Redmond does have serious concerns over competition from Linux for the all important business marketplace for servers. I think it'll still be a while before Linux will compete with Microsoft for the desktop and some important things to watch will be how do businesses react to upgrading to a new version of Windows.

Microsoft is trying to time a forced upgrade to a new version of Windows to lock in customers for the next several years before businesses start to look at alternatives. Keep in mind that Windows 2000 will see their end of support come later this summer time and many bussinesses will hold onto their older copies of Windows as long as possible.

The next several years we will see several products die off and several other products brought to life. A couple good examples are the Firefox browser which has brought back the browser wars. Lotus Notes also has a distinct possibility of being cut adrift by IBM as IBM starts to focus more on their Linux products and seem to be umwilling to turn Lotus Notes into an Open Source product. These are jsut a couple of example of changes which are taking place in the IT industry. Fun things to look forward to.